When we’re concerned about our kids’ behavior, their stress and difficult moods, a lack of motivation, or an overall sense that we’re not in harmony with them — the solution almost certainly comes down to “less.” In this episode, Janet is joined by Kim John Payne, M.ED., renowned family consultant, lecturer, and author of the seminal parenting guide Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids. The book has been aptly described as “a manifesto for protecting the grace of childhood,” and there is much of Kim’s science-backed approach which supports and complements Janet’s. In their view, our fast-paced, competitive culture (“too much, too soon”) takes the joy out of parenting and can overwhelm our children, causing anxiety, insecurity, and many common behavioral problems. Kim and Janet discuss how the power of less can create the family life we always imagined and allow children to thrive.
Transcript of “Realize Your Child’s Potential With the Power of Less (With Kim John Payne)”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
For more than three decades, Kim John Payne has been passionately working to help parents discover some simple, practical solutions to a more peaceful, joyful life with what he calls “the power of less.” That’s less pressure on us to do for our kids, less stuff, less noise, and less distraction from what matters most to us. He has simple, doable suggestions around less that also result in less chaos, less behavior challenges, less energy spent on teaching and managing our kids, less of a sense of disconnectedness, and much less worry and overwhelm. And more room for our families to flourish. I feel blessed to have Kim here as my guest today for what he refers to as “a fireside chat.” I love that he calls it that.
Hi, Kim.
Kim John Payne: What a treat to talk to you, goodness. Thank you for inviting me.
Janet Lansbury: Thank you so much for being here and for your incredible work. I didn’t realize that you’ve actually authored 10 books and you have your own podcast, The Simplicity Parenting Podcast, which you’ve been doing since 2018. I was wondering, just speaking of simplicity, how do you do it all?
Kim John Payne: One of the things I very much apply to myself, I don’t know if you do this, but I find if I have a very intentional, rhythmical week. Monday, I deal with all the schools that I work with. That’s my other hat, by the way. I work with schools, helping kids with behavioral and social and emotional issues.
Janet Lansbury: Yes, I meant to add that. You’re consulting, you’re speaking, you’re teaching. So, more.
Kim John Payne: Yeah, so that’s Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thursdays, I’m speaking with parents in my parent counseling work. Then Fridays and so on, and so it goes. I find if I have a rhythm, which is, broadly speaking, broken up into morning and afternoon and the days of the week. I schedule in time for thinking, time for just being able to contemplate and decompress. I find that the myriad of things that many of us take on these days—most of us don’t do just one thing, particularly if you’re a parent! Then it all feels like, Okay, I know what’s coming up in this week, and it’s not like a tsunami forming out to sea on Sunday evenings. You kind of know what’s happening and you can walk into the workweek with a degree of structure. I think that’s how I navigate this.
Because I also have a farm to run, a working farm, so there’s that as well. And I have my own two children and Katherine, my wife, and all that stuff. And if it’s rhythmical, it’s doable, basically.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah. So you actually have a schedule that you stick to and then you end at a certain time of the day and let yourself end work. Because I know with the kind of work that we both do, it can be 24 hours, just like being a parent can be 24 hours a day. You have to know how to cut it off.
Kim John Payne: Well, the good thing about it, though, is that when things get a bit wacko or there’s some big project that comes up or whatever it is that happens to us all, then you can go with it for whatever it takes, but then you’ve got a base to come back to of rhythm, of structure. It’s almost like we put deposits in the royal bank of resiliency when we have that kind of predictability in our lives. So that when we need to draw down on them if there’s a big deal, like a tragedy, a bereavement, or a dear pet dies, or we’ve got to go on a big trip and it’s a bit too much travel and we know it, it’s too much for the kids. Now, that’s certainly withdrawing from the bank of resiliency, but we’ve got our savings. Because we hear this thing all the time, Oh, kids are resilient. And they are, if we help them be resilient by giving them a simple and balanced life. And rhythm is a part of that.
Janet Lansbury: I couldn’t agree more. And it’s a common misconception that parents have with what I share that they say, you’re talking about having a rhythm and a routine to your day with your baby—that you find together, it’s not just about me imposing it on a child. But they say, “Oh, won’t that create more dependency on everything going a certain way?” And I say, actually, no. It’s the opposite. It helps children to feel so secure and a part of things and confident in themselves, so that they are more resilient and able to be more spontaneous. Because they do, like you said, they have that reserve built up of I know what’s going to happen today and I know when I can relax and I know when I’m going to be putting energy into something. It’s all a rhythm. So yeah, I think that’s commonly misunderstood, but you’re spot on.
Kim John Payne: Right from the early age with infants, they’re developing their nervous system and particularly the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, as you know. And when we have predictability and a simple life that is not overwhelming our kids, it’s not the too much, too fast, too soon, too sexy, too young, just too much, the overwhelm lifestyle. Then their nervous system, when they’re infants, starts laying down beautiful pathways where the sympathetic nervous system, which is all about the stimulation. It’s all about the visit to the supermarket, it’s all about aunties and uncles coming by, all the things that are stimulating and a baby needs to respond to or an infant needs to respond to. And then there’s the parasympathetic, of course, which is the calming, soothing, digesting emotionally. Just giving kids decompression time that’s not overscheduling, that’s not go, go, go, go, go. Then as children grow up into being toddlers and beyond, they have a nervous system that is in balance. And when that nervous system is in balance, they can have exciting times, but they can come back. Not just to the family, but back even right intrinsically inside themselves and then calm and soothe.
You see evidence of it when a child will go to the doctor’s office, which is all very, very busy, and then they’ll come home and they’ll play doctors or they’ll play a nurse or they’ll play waiting rooms. And they calm and soothe enough to be able to play it out. I think of it as “playing it out.” It’s not just absorbing, absorbing, absorbing. It’s actually decompressing and digesting. It’s the same as food: We eat and we digest. So there’s stimulation in a child’s life, but in equal amounts there needs to be the downtime, the digesting time.
A lot of contemporary western culture has normalized what is just way too much sympathetic nervous system activity. And I guess what the thing that you and I talk a lot about in common is giving the calming, the decompressing, and then you can have the exciting times and then calm. So that it doesn’t become goofy and overwhelming and behavioral problems start up and a child just simply won’t go to bed and won’t go to sleep. People used to ask me, Janet, when my children were very little, “What time do you start getting your child ready for bed?” And I would always slightly humorously answer, “Oh, 6:00 a.m.”
Janet Lansbury: Yeah, it’s about the whole day. I think the other thing too about being busy with a very young child especially, but a child of any age, is that without that consistency that they can feel a little on top of, I know what’s going to happen here. I know what’s coming next. Without that, then they are really passengers to life and they feel like that. They feel like they can really only count on the consistency of the parent, and sometimes that results in parents worrying that their child is too clingy or they’re not confident socially. It’s because they’re kind of just holding on to that one consistent thing in their life, which is a relationship with their parents.
Kim John Payne: And there’s an extrinsic and intrinsic. So extrinsically, it’s great that they can rely on the rhythm of the parent, if indeed that’s there, which is not always for sure. Or even if it becomes arrhythmical, it will return back, everything’s going to be okay. And then there’s the intrinsic, and that’s the nervous system. So the extrinsic is the outside rhythm, but the intrinsic is the nervous system of a child. That they know how to self-soothe, because the child who can self-soothe as an infant is a child who can self-manage as a teenager. The two things are very, very connected. And so beginning with the end in mind, if we are going to have kids making good decisions, and it’s not a decision based on more and more excitement and more and more risk-taking, if we raise children that have that downtime, that decompression time and balance with the uptime and the stimulating time, we’ll have 16-year-olds that when it comes to their friends saying, “Hey, let’s go and do whatever,” some very risky behavior, they’ll be able to actually hit the pause button because they know how to do it. Because it’s intrinsically been given to them as infants and as toddlers and as very young children.
Janet Lansbury: Yes, wow.
I want to back up a little bit and just talk about your book Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids. It’s a classic, I think needed more now than ever. And I’ve known of your work, I’ve had all this respect for you and felt like our views were very aligned and in many cases overlapped, and I knew I’d appreciate your approach. But I am kind of embarrassed to say, I just finally read your book, this book, Simplicity Parenting. Now I want to read all of them, boy did it resonate.
And what you do with this book is nail something that’s simple, like the title says, but so easy to overlook. I mean, it’s like we know these things, I feel like, but we need to be encouraged, we need to be reminded of them. And that’s true with so many of the things that I share with parents. It’s like they say, “Okay, that’s what I thought. Thank you for affirming it or encouraging me.” We have the instincts, but they get lost somewhere. And I think that’s clear in your book as well, that you’re saying that there are solutions to all these issues that we’re having with our children where we’re worried about their behavior, they’re having all this acting out behavior or whatever you want to call it. They’re also not focusing like we think they should or they’re not motivated. All of these things can be seen with this wide lens that you use, and we can see that it’s actually not so much just stress in the immediate or what’s going on in that family in the moment. It’s the way that our whole environment is set up.
This was very eye-opening to me, because I’ve known for a long time, of course, that children’s behavior is stress-related, and when they’re acting out, it’s often from a place of dysregulation. But to be able to see how there are changes we can make, I mean things like the amount of toys and the foods and the rhythms, there’s changes we can make that will help children naturally settle in and change these behaviors without us even focusing on them. Anyway, that’s what I got from your book. I was so excited to hear these solutions that are really simple, doable, small steps. It’s not this overwhelming thing of like, We’ve got to change our whole life! It’s, Just try this first.
And this is the part I also love. You may not like this comparison, but did you ever read Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up?
Kim John Payne: Yeah. Apparently she knows of Simplicity Parenting.
Janet Lansbury: Oh wow, that makes sense.
Kim John Payne: Yes.
Janet Lansbury: She said to imagine the way you want your spaces to look, the way you want your surroundings to feel. Just think big. Imagine what you would wish for the perfect home for you. You say that too: Dream of how your life could be with your child or your children. And I feel like that’s so important. That it’s not about even doing, it’s about our vision, it’s about pondering what it is that we want. And then you give these very practical steps for how parents can get there. There’s so much pressure out there on parents to do more. We need all the encouragement we can get to really trust the power of less, as you call it, and trust our child to initiate if they need more.
But that’s something you can trust from the time they’re babies, in terms of stimulation. This is what Magda Gerber taught me, that a baby will naturally seek the stimulation that they need. But if we’re doing, doing, doing, they’re not going to be able to do that and it’s just probably going to be too much.
Kim John Payne: One of the things that I’ve discovered from when I was—and I write about this a little bit in the book, but it’s come up for me more as the years go on. When I first started my adult career, actually I was a student, and I was working in a group home for some very, very troubled teenagers. And I was attending lectures by a wonderful medical doctor who was a psychiatrist, and he had been a medic in the second World War, he had been a doctor in the Korean conflict, and then by then he’d become a psychiatrist for the Vietnam War. And he was talking about what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. That term wasn’t used much back then, but that’s what he was talking about, what we’d recognize now. And he was talking about combat veterans who weren’t doing so well, and I was thinking while he was saying that, Gosh, he’s talking about Maria in my group home. Oh, that’s Lucas in my group home. Oh, that combat veteran sounds just like Mitch. And so I asked him, I said, look, these kids are not combat veterans. What’s happening? He encouraged me to keep thinking about it, and I did. I was at college at the time and I did a little bit of writing about it and so on.
And then he encouraged me to explore it some more, so I volunteered when I was traveling. I volunteered in some various war-torn areas, particularly in Southeast Asia at the time, in really tense areas like Indonesia and then Thai/Cambodian refugee camps. And there I saw it again, and I saw nervous, jumpy, hypervigilant, very controlling, overwhelmed kids, just like I’d left back in the group home. And I thought, huh, they look really similar. So I decided to do some more study. So I went to the UK with one of the very few colleges that had anything like what we would now call trauma studies. And I set up a little counseling practice and through the door came kids with their parents who were struggling a bit, but just from mixed economic, mixed racial, mixed ethnic backgrounds. And they looked just like the kids that I had previously been supporting as a small part of a large team in various war-torn areas.
And Janet, I didn’t know what to make of it, right? Because in some ways I wanted to be done with all that trauma stuff. And when I looked at their biographies, I just thought, well, hang on. There’s nothing here that is war, that is abusive, what’s going on? And what started occurring to me was that stress is cumulative. I know that’s awfully obvious, but it was all post-grad, and when you’re doing post-grad work, you’re not supposed to have obvious thoughts, it all has to be very complicated. I thought, well, if stress is cumulative, what if we cumulatively simplified and took it away as much as we could? If we un-stressed. And as we unstressed these kids’ lives, they defaulted back from being ADD, ODD, PDD, OCD, there was no shortage of Ds, lots of Ds, pick your D. But they defaulted and they started defaulting back to being just quirky, being just lovable and kind of infuriating sometimes, but just quirky. The kids who were ADD-hyperactive defaulted back just to being busy kids. The kids who were obsessional and compulsive, they defaulted back just to being kids who really like things to be ordered. And so it goes.
But then it didn’t stop there. Because the parents said to me, Well, can we keep doing this? Can we keep simplifying? Can we keep dialing back on scheduling? Can we keep dialing back on screens? Can we keep dialing back on all the forces, like all the stuff that we have to buy and keep up with? And I said, Well, of course. And so they did. And this is the thing that is just beautiful, and it still moves me to this day to remember it and to also know it is still, as you were saying before, Janet, more applicable now than ever. These kids went from disordered, so-called “disordered” or very problematic behavior, to being quirky. Parents would say, I just feel like I’ve got my kid back. But it didn’t stop there. What happened is as they continued to question the new normal of the supersized sort of family life and overwhelm, and they kept it simple, they kept it balanced, these kids, it wasn’t just their quirk. Now, it was their gift, their genius. So the same kids who were so-called “hyperactive,” they were movement kids, but now they were the movers and shakers. They were really popular kids to play with because they had all kinds of ideas. Back when life was booming and buzzing and moving too fast they were no fun to play with because they just couldn’t settle, they tried to control the environment. Now they had friends, their schoolwork was improving, and so on and so on.
So one thing I’ve learned is that we all have our quirks, but when we push kids too hard, that quirk becomes fevered. And I talk about that in that book, you may have caught that section. Their quirk becomes fevered and problematic. We slow their lives down and balance—I’m not suggesting that we don’t have fun and up times and busy times, that’s all part of life. But when we balance that with downtime, decompression time, then any child’s quirk doesn’t become problematic anymore, it’s not fevered. They move into flow, and then you see their gifts. Because the child who previously was oppositional defiant disorder or whatever, is a feisty kid. That’s their quirk. But when they don’t feel that their life is under threat and that they have what Dan Goldman calls “amygdala hijack,” the fight, flight, freeze, flock, fawn reaction. Or if you’re a little child, it’s another f, it’s just flop. Just flop on the ground, it’s all too much. Why not? It’s a good place to be. And then the child who is oppositional becomes a protector of the weak. It’s beautiful to watch them be feisty, no longer on their own behalf, but on the behalf of someone else. Now, they’re not operating from their amygdala, they’re operating from their limbic system, their love brain. And it’s beautiful to see, when we can question the new normal of too muchness, how kids’ gifts begin to shine.
You probably know, Janet, we have, I think it’s about 1200 Simplicity Parenting coaches all around the world. And this is something that they all universally report, from all the different countries. And it’s a simple little training—well, it’d be ironic if it was complicated. But this is something we hear over and over is, My child’s gift is shining now. And that is just so moving and that’s what’s available to us. I’m not suggesting kids don’t have tendencies and I’m not suggesting there’s no such thing as these diagnoses, but really if we want our child’s gifts to start peeking through, then we’ll keep a life that’s in balance.
Janet Lansbury: I love the way that you described play as a child’s way of meditation. Here’s from your book: “Losing oneself in the flow of something deeply engrossing. It is the type of involvement—whether with an art or construction project, or reading—when time stands still. Self-consciousness and frustration fall away; your child is focused and in control. They are connected with what they are doing, but also connecting with who they are. This is the deep-rooted quality of creativity.”
Kim John Payne: Oh, did I write that? Did I?
Janet Lansbury: You did. It wasn’t even a pull-out quote. Now I know what a pull-out quote is.
Kim John Payne: Oh, good. I’m rather pleased.
Janet Lansbury: I love that, exactly what you’re talking about there, that flow of play. And I’ve always been fascinated by that and how that is so essential to that sense of self and what we are here to bring to the world, to get philosophical, I guess. But I love when children are in it, I love when I’m in it, I’m always trying to help parents find that. But it really is removing some of that stimulation that isn’t serving us, that isn’t bringing us joy, and allowing space for that. It just needs space and time and us understanding our role. That children don’t need us to be their entertainment directors, and they don’t need us to fill their days with stimulation. And what they need is to have time to process everything, including self.
Kim John Payne: I think of one of the metaphors—I put this in the second edition, like the 10th anniversary of Simplicity Parenting book—is that if you imagine a tap pouring into a cup, I don’t know if you saw that little illustration, but there’s a tap pouring into a cup. And the content coming out of that faucet, the water, I think of as what goes on in life, the water of life. There it is pouring into a child’s vessel. The cup is representing all that they’re asked to do during a day, all the things that happen. Now for so many kids, because we’ve normalized overwhelm, for so many kids there’s spillage, there’s overflow, it’s just overflowing. And that overflow, that spillage, is what we would call behavior. So that’s pushback, that’s stubbornness, that’s also called tantrums. That’s all this, I have had it! I’m screaming, I’m shouting, I’m crying, I’m uncomfortable. I won’t do it! No, you can’t make me! You’re no boss of me! All that stuff. And our choice is, do we want to spend our life mopping up spillage or do we want to turn down the tap?
And what my work—and if I may say, Janet, your work too—is about is turning down the tap. It’s understanding the spillage, you’ve got to understand the behavior, but the behavior is an outcome of too much content pouring into a child’s vessel, and they just can’t take it anymore. So in any way we can, in doable, small little ways, turning down the tap. And really in the evening, sitting back and thinking or talking with a partner, talking with a friend, saying, How can we rationalize this? How can I simplify things? I’ve had a really rotten day or a rotten week. Everything was hard, all the transitions were hard. Because transitions being hard, it’s a surefire sign of spillage. What can I do to dial this back and turn down the tap?
And the answer to that might be myriad things, like as you were talking about in the Simplicity Parenting book. It might be just decluttering. It might be just that extra trip, that extra party, that extra play date, that trip that we’re planning. That holiday that was fun for us, but it was a lot of travel. Or you know what? There’s just too many screens in a child’s life. That’s all sympathetic nervous system and dopamine, screens coming at a child’s life. It’s another whole big, big, big, big subject. But what can I do to dial this back?
And I think that’s where we don’t almost really need to buy a book about it—and I know my editor won’t enjoy me saying that!—it’s at a gut level. It’s an instinctual level. Sometimes people say to me, “Where do I go, Kim, to find out more information?” It’s almost always at the end of an interview, “Where can we find out more information?” My answer always is, “Within your gut.” It’s within your instinct.
Janet Lansbury: And observations of our children, too.
Kim John Payne: Yeah, observations and observations of their spillage, of their behavior when it’s all getting too much. Or when you go through peaceful days when they’re playing creatively, when they’re relating to siblings or friends beautifully, you’ll pretty much know that you’ve been successful in balancing what’s coming into their cup and what they can drink, what they can take sustenance from. Our head is being told no right from the get-go, building up their college resume at kind of five years of age or even younger. You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that. You’ve got to do this. Because otherwise they’re not going to be successful.
The opposite is true, the diametric opposite is true. I work in fancy universities and I know the kids that get into those very competitive colleges are the kids that are well-balanced on a human level. Yet that’s all our head telling us that we’ve got to do all this stuff because after all, everyone’s doing it. But at a gut level, I think many of us know, Janet, that something feels off. We never had to cope with anywhere near what society is asking kids to cope with now. And I think if we listen to our gut and action that, our kids are going to have a balanced and beautiful life.
Janet Lansbury: I think it’s scary to get off of that train sometimes. I feel blessed that I had this mentor who just got me in that frame of mind of taking cues from my baby, that they were going to unfold in their own perfect way and time. With, of course, me holding boundaries, keeping them safe, helping them stay appropriate when they’re learning about that. But within that framework, it’s all in them. We don’t have to put anything in there. In fact, that gets in the way of what’s in there when we’re trying to add stuff and stimulate and have them do this kind of class and that kind of lesson. They will naturally be drawn to what they need if we’re open and just giving them a typical life. It doesn’t even have to be anything fancy in terms of toys or activities. It’s that idea of trusting.
And I think parents maybe don’t realize that that’s where the joy is in parenting too. It’s discovering this person. You also had another quote that sounds similar to what Magda used to say, which is, “The more you say, the less you are listening.” She said, “When we’re doing, we’re not seeing.” So whatever that takes for us to trust ourselves, I guess, just kind of relax into our role.
We make it so much harder than it needs to be. I see that around me all the time and the parents that I hear from. All these responsibilities we’re taking on that really don’t belong to us, yet we might be missing the simple things that will help, that children do need from us. Just that simple structure, trying to find a rhythm. A lot of parents resist that. You talk about that in your book, how parents are like, Well, I couldn’t possibly. Every day is different and it has to be this way. And I love that part of the book actually, because you’re really able to understand that and also help just find these little tiny moments or spaces that could be made a little bit bigger or happen a little bit more often in a child’s life and affect the whole family in a positive way.
Kim John Payne: It’s one of the worries that parents have about having their children have a simple and balanced life. They say, Well, isn’t that putting kids in a bubble? I hear it all the time. Isn’t that putting kids in a bubble? And I think it’s a fair thought, we don’t want to prevent our kids from interacting with the world. But I’d make a sort of a metaphor shift there where it’s not actually a bubble. The way I think about having children have a simple and balanced home life is that I think of it as a harbor. And a harbor is a place where, when they’re very, very little, they can build their boats, they can build good, seaworthy boats. When they’re toddling, they can start to stock them, they can get ready for their little journeys. And then out of the harbor, they toddle. Only a little bit, not out to the big sea. And then back their boat comes to the harbor, because it was a little bit bumpy out there and things didn’t go so well in the playground or that was big fun. But back to home. And as best as we can possibly do, with all the limits that we have, we create a place where they can relax, repair if needed, restock. And when they’re three or four, they’ll go a little further and then come back. And when they’re 12 or 13, they go a little bit further now, out into the sea. And when they’re teenagers, way out onto the horizon and then back they come from college, bearing their laundry.
It’s not at all that we’re trying to prevent our children from relating to the world. In fact, it’s the opposite. When we give them a harbor, they can go out into the world and be more resilient. They can handle the bumpy seas because their little boats are seaworthy, because we’ve helped them build those seaworthy boats. We’ve helped them have good brain function, good nervous system development. We’ve helped them be healthy through food. We’ve helped them have healthy brains through not exposing them to toxic screen culture. We’ve done many, many things for them, but that’s not a bubble. So they can go out into the big world and enjoy it, make good decisions. And even if they make bad decisions, they’ve got somewhere to come back to that is warm, enveloping, and will help them repair from the terrible breakup with the first boyfriend or girlfriend, from the rejection of a group of friends, from whatever it is. But it’s not a bubble, it’s a harbor.
Janet Lansbury: There’s a lot of letting go in parenting. It’s like a constant letting go, letting go, letting go of control over things. And that’s challenging.
Another area that I’m extremely interested in, as anybody that listens to this podcast will know, that you talk about in your book is emotional intelligence. And you talk about this in terms of parents sometimes giving too much information, too much narration, talking about emotions. And I think that’s a really hard one right now because there’s a lot of information out there encouraging parents to make sure that your child knows what all the different feelings are when they’re two or three years old so they can express it and say exactly what it is and all of that. And you bring up some wonderful points. One of them is a quote I just wanted to share: “Emotional intelligence can’t be bought or rushed. It develops with the slow emergence of identity, and the gradual accumulation of life experiences. When we push a young child toward an awareness they don’t yet have, we transpose our own emotions, and our own voice, on theirs. We overwhelm them. For the first nine or ten years children learn mainly through imitation. Your emotions, and the way that you manage them, is the model they ‘imprint,’ more than what you say or instruct about emotions.”
Kim John Payne: Yeah, it’s hard because there’s such a swath, as you said, of books and of people saying, You have to do all this. You have to sort of talk about it and talk about it a lot. And it relates to the point you were making before, Janet. It’s a lovely thought, it’s almost a sort of a way of thinking: Is childhood an enrichment opportunity or is it a gently unfolding experience? And if we can get the idea that childhood is a gently unfolding experience and not that we’re trying to pack 18 years of development into the first four, then we’re going to let the children’s brain myelinate in a really healthy way.
For example, the traffic across the brain bridge, across the corpus callosum from right to left brain, it’s very minimal right up until about in the sort of tween years, 10, 11, 12, 13, and then 14, 15. And it’s really not complete until the early twenties. If we ask a child, “What are you feeling? What are your feelings feeling?”, they can’t easily answer it because they don’t understand cause and effect yet. They’re not crossing the right-left brain. They are totally within. They can’t step outside it to name it, they’re in it. They’re not crossing that bridge yet.
Janet Lansbury: Right, to analyze themselves.
Kim John Payne: I once stood out in front of my school and a mum—I knew which book she was reading, actually. I could tell, I’ve read them all—and her child was not doing well. And she said, “Well, let’s go to your feelings. What are your feelings feeling?” And the little girl said, “I don’t know!” She was five or six years old. “I don’t know!” And the mum said, “Well, I’ll name them.” And she started naming, “Are you sad? Are you angry?” And the girl got more and more out of her words, I could see. Now, I knew this girl from the kindergarten, and she was quite a character. And I thought, Oh gosh, something’s going to happen here. And in the end, the little girl hauled off and she kicked her mother so hard and she ran. And I thought, You go, girl! What a terribly sensible response, because she was overwhelmed and her mother was looking at her as if she should know and she didn’t.
Now some children can learn what to say, but that is just masking because they don’t know. And the reason I say this with such surety is that it’s just the straightforward brain science. It’s not me making it up or wanting to fit a nice little paradigm. They genuinely don’t. And when we have this overwhelm of adult information and then asking them to go to their feelings and name their feelings and talk, it’s overwhelming. And that’s spillage, we’re back to spillage.
Can we say to a child, “Oh, that just didn’t work out like you wanted it to”? Because a lot of children explode because they have this rich imagination of the way that shoebox was going to be just the right kind of firehouse. And the scissors slipped and it went in all these different shapes. “It just didn’t work out! No!” And now they’ve thrown it on the ground. And actually a lot of it is caused by their very deep imagination, and what’s happening outside them doesn’t conform to that. And they’re frustrated as can be. Now, a parent could say, “Now let’s talk about your feelings. Are you feeling frustrated?” Or you could say, “Oh my goodness, Jacob, that just didn’t work out like you wanted it to, ugh” because that then deals with their will, with their lived practical experience, because that’s right where they’re at.
Janet Lansbury: And it’s also saying just what we’re seeing in front of us. We’re not trying to guess or put words in their mouth.
Kim John Payne: Well, then we’re helping them co-regulate. Then we’re understanding where they’re coming from, and then they can live inside their experience and know that we understand their experience. My grandma, my nana used to say to me all the time when I was frustrated, “Oh, dear.”
Janet Lansbury: Perfect.
Kim John Payne: And she would hold out her arm and I would put my arm and the crook of my elbow into the crook of her elbow. She would stroke my arm and just say, “Oh, dear.” So when I was very frustrated, I would take my arm across to her and she would see me coming with my arm out, she lived next door. And I would just put my arm in her arm, she would stroke my forearm. And to this day, I can never remember her any time ever trying to problem-solve with me. It was just, “Oh, dear.”
And after quite a few Oh, dears, then we’d have a little thing to eat, and then I would go back out and take on the project. Because then my adrenaline and cortisol had drained down, you see. That’s my understanding of it. And I’d co-regulated, I’d reattached, and I’d basically come back into the safe harbor of nana. Now I could go back out and try and build that pesky fort that wasn’t working out because the roof collapsed, because now I’ve got a new idea of how I can get a great big piece of very dangerous rusty metal sheeting and put it on the roof. I’m not making that up, that actually was real! But we don’t need to talk about it. We can let children—
Janet Lansbury: Express it their way. And they’re in everything. That’s one of the things I love about working with children is that they’re in the feeling. They can’t talk about what it is, they’re totally in it. Every cell in their body’s in it. They’re fully engaged. And I think I sort of fantasize about that, I want to be like that. So I really love that about them.
Kim John Payne: But hey, Janet, that could be a chapter in your new book: They’re in it when they’re in it. That could be a t-shirt.
Janet Lansbury: Yeah! They’re in it when they’re in it.
Well, unfortunately, we have to end. I could talk to you for hours, and I’ll probably ask you to do it again if you’re willing. But for now, I actually want to end with one of my favorite quotes in your book, and it kind of relates to a lot of things we were talking about: “It’s not just what you make of your time. It’s whether you have the time to make it your own.” And this is what children want. This is what we want as a family, right? As parents, we want this to be our experience, not something we’re trying to do to perform for this, that, or the other, or do it “right.” This is ours. We get to design it. And then, of course, see what happens. Because whatever goes on with our child is going to be this incredible, fun surprise. But this is ours, we can make this our own.
And I feel like you really offer a way to find these clear spaces to really see what’s going on and what we want and receive the gifts of that, in terms of our relationships with our children, the trust that’s developed, the way that they flourish, finding more ease and calm in our lives.
Anyway, I think you’re a genius. Just got to say that. And I love that you shared so many of your gifts in this book and with us here today.
Kim John Payne: Oh gosh, what a treat to talk to you. It is funny that we have to do a podcast in order to chat like this, like a fireside chat. But yeah, let’s do that again sometime.
Janet Lansbury: That would be wonderful. Thank you so much.
Kim John Payne: Bye-bye for now. Many, many blessings on you and all your work, and everyone who tunes in to your podcast.
Originally published by Janet Lansbury on August 20, 2024
